Post-Modern Juke Box Experiences

There are time capsules in the rural Mid-West, not retro constructs, but temporal dislocations that remain as was, for lack of a reason to be other. Restaurants steeped, not in nostalgia, but in a comfortable inertia; diners that serve broast, broiled and breaded, drive-ins where the movies you missed can now (if you have a mind to), miss again. We have bars where the jukebox is not a junk box but a wood and chrome depository for archived time-warping selections. Beer here has a fabled and dusty history, and is brewed as meaty as a rolled-up forearm. Astronauts are grown here, the moon is their backyard, their silvery spaceships launch each year from every State Fair. We’re futuristic in a plaid and dilatory way, we are as post-modern as Jetson reruns. We dwell just West of the middle of tomorrow.